Dassault Upgrades PLM Portfolio

Paris — March 15, 2004 — Dassault Systemes and IBM have released version 5 release 13 (V5R13) of their product lifecycle management (PLM) portfolio, adding features that the two providers say will give engineers greater visibility into the impact of their design decisions.

The V5R13 portfolio is comprised of CATIA for collaborative product development, and ENOVIA and SMARTEAM for product data and lifecycle management, collaboration and decision support. Concurrently, Dassault Systemes announced V5R13 of DELMIA for the engineering of lean manufacturing processes.

Dassault said that V5R13 extends engineering practices to include relational design, a PLM best practice that provides engineers with visibility on dependencies and the impact of their decisions. With relational design, engineers can better manage design modifications, including impacts on functional specifications, analysis and manufacturing constraints, resulting in higher quality designs the first time, fewer engineering changes later in the design cycle and more opportunity for innovation, according to Dassault.

A key feature in the V5R13 release is the new ENOVIA VPM Navigator product, intended to let manufacturers take maximum advantage of relational design, integrating ENOVIA's virtual product definition into CATIA's design environment. This unified PLM workspace was designed to let teams work together as one during critical product development phases, which Dassault says can result in faster and easier "right first time" collective product innovation.

V5R13 also extends industry-specific capabilities that support new product introduction programs, makes them available to supply chains and smaller businesses, and improves deployability through increased openness and standards support, according to Dassault.

"Merging product design with product data management in a single unified environment makes it significantly easier for engineers to effectively collaborate, navigate and work in context on complex product structures," said Bernard Charles, president and CEO of Dassault. "It enables them to exploit relational design to its full extent. The benefit of knowing in advance the impact of engineering changes, as well as the associated time savings, allows manufacturers to focus on innovation — the key to success in today's competitive marketplace."

"To break into global healthcare markets, our company required a complete solution for the development and delivery of innovative surgical instruments and implants," said Sylvie Plumet, vice president at Dassault customer Aesculap Implants, a European player in the medical implant device market. "Automated design updates and tracking functions allow us to reduce the time necessary to develop and deliver high quality orthopedic devices to a growing international market. More importantly for our business, we now have total traceability of the entire product development process."

Dassault also said that its DELMIA solution for the engineering of lean manufacturing processes enables manufacturing process-planning collaboration between an OEM and its tier-one suppliers, with the potential to significantly reduce the time it takes to update large product structures between the engineering hub and manufacturing hubs.